A personal blog written by a boy born in West Africa, raised in the Caribbean and living in the USA. Asking questions and getting answers.

Jun 23, 2016

“Are you a Nigga?” part 1

The first question I would like to ask assuming you are a black person is this:

Can you look at yourself and say “I, *insert name here* am a nigga”.

“ you, *insert black male’s name here you respect* are a nigga”… “you *insert black female’s name here your respect* are a nigga”… “we are all niggas”.

If you can do that as a black person, and agree with those statements as a way to describe yourself and any other black man or woman, then you my friend need afro-therapy…

If you can’t keep reading.

From that little exercise above can you see a little bit how definitions work? Most of the people who believe there is nothing wrong with black people using the word among themselves say that because they believe they have “redefined” the word as a “term of endearment” .

good job mate.

However, those same people would probably have a hard time saying and agreeing with those statements proudly. Why? Because in the context it was put it in, there was only one rational meaning for the word “nigga” even tho I used an “a” at the end of “nigg” and not the dreaded, dirty, nasty “er” ending. yuck(sarcasm).

Truth is the word has not been reclaimed for shit and it will never be reclaimed.

All that was done was that it was given another meaning in a new particular context. When you go in the dictionary and look up a word you usually see several meanings. Why? because when a word gets a new meaning under a specific context we don’t just say “ Oh nice one, we gon’ just use this here meaning only, this the best one!” What we do is hit enter, start on a new line and add another possible meaning and specify the context upon which it takes that meaning.

You can try to “reclaim” the word “bad” and “bitch” too. “Oh that’s a bad bitch”, “that’s badass” etc. but at the end of the day when I say “you smell very bad”, “look at that tall bitch over there”… those statements will still mean what they ALWAYS meant.

So no black people didn’t “reclaim” the word nigga for their own personal verbal recreation. It still also STILL means what it always did.

sorry to break it to yah bruh

After the long terrible history of the word; the use of nigga by black people to describe other black people became an ignorant trend originally coming out of poor and uneducated house holds and made popular by the hip hop movement. The same movement which also helped to give us so many other NICE “hip” things that we say and do like: calling women bitches, and other misogynistic catch phrases. It simply just became the slang of the day, and that is how it got some of the small “endearment” meaning that it has today came.

I put endearment in quotations because it isn’t actually endearing to be called “a nigga”. Endearing means…

thanks google.

But if it was truly a word of endearment, there would be no instance in which saying “I am a nigga” could have any type of negative connotation at all; even though that is all it has in that simple context. Every black person should then be proud to be niggas.

The fact that it is thought of as a word of “endearment” today among black people in actuality is just black people believing and celebrating the fact they are all part of the same dehumanized subgroup that their white slave masters classified them to be in. “You are one of us too.”

The reality that black people chose that word of all words in the english vernacular; a derogatory name which has been used for centuries to dehumanize them shows how misguided black people can be. A word that many times were the last words heard by many black people before they were killed in hatred.

Sadly even after all of that, to this day EVEN black people use the word to describe other black people with that SAME MEANING, you can go on twitter, instagram look at pics and memes and see this besides just observing its use among black people everyday. Does that not strike you as odd?

No black leader with any ounce of ethnic pride and respect for themselves has ever used that word to describe any other black person, Malcolm X even made it a point to say “so called negros” everytime he used the word.

Martin Luther, Marcus Garvey would roll over in their grave twice if they discovered black people are using that word to describe each other today.

Furthermore there is nothing that black people have even minutely come close to doing to even come close to “reversing” the reality of all the terrible acts and CONSEQUENCES of people viewing black people as what that words signifies. And calling that word now a term of “endearment” is almost a spit in the face of the millions* of black people who DIED because they were FALSELY classified as something below human.

For me my name is Emmanuel, you can refer to me by that name, if not you can call me brotha, remember there was a time were brotha and sista were the words used to categorize black brothas and sistas…. sigh. If you want to describe me by a group name that I represent, then you can use were I come from to describe me, my tribe or nationality or whatever. Things that are all TRUE about who I am… not nigga meaning ignorant, slow, basic, ugly all FALSE classifications of an entire race of people. Unfortunately most black people in America who use the word ignorantly don’t think like this, neither do they know much about themselves, so they call themselves by the only group name that they know and identify with that is the ‘niggas’ group given to them.